Coast Guard MALE drones have moved into the procurement pipeline. The Defence Ministry issued a Request for Information around July 15 seeking ten Medium Altitude Long Endurance Remotely Piloted Aircraft for the Indian Coast Guard, and prospective bidders have until October 7 to respond.

What the Request for Information sets out

The Ministry says it intends to procure ten MALE RPAs "for use by Indian Coast Guard". The aircraft are earmarked for the force's Aviation Wing.

Two mission sets are named. Search and rescue, and the safety and security of mariners in the Exclusive Economic Zone, which runs 200 nautical miles from the coastline. The RFI also covers the Indian Search and Rescue Region, a far larger area that in places extends out to 1,000 nautical miles. That second figure is the one that shapes the requirement. An aircraft asked to reach a distress position 1,000 nautical miles offshore and then hold station over it needs an endurance measured in most of a day, not in hours, and it needs a satellite link to stay useful once it is out there.

No performance figures in the public domain

The reported text of the RFI carries no payload, endurance, range or sensor-fit numbers, and names no preferred configuration. Wire reporting values the eventual tender at around Rs 2,000 crore. That figure does not appear in the Ministry language quoted from the document itself, so treat it as an industry estimate rather than a sanctioned cost.

Coast Guard MALE drones and the beyond line of sight gap

The driver the Ministry sets out is surveillance and reconnaissance beyond line of sight. SATCOM enabled MALE platforms can hold a persistent picture along the full length of India's borders, maritime boundaries included, which sortie based patrolling by manned aircraft cannot do.

The Coast Guard flies Dornier maritime patrol aircraft and helicopters today. Both are crewed, both are bound by crew endurance, and both have to come home. Coast Guard MALE drones would be the first large unmanned aircraft the force has operated for surveillance and for search and rescue work, and the first that can be kept airborne while the crew flying them changes shift on the ground.

Small drones are not new to the service. A maiden contract for ten multicopter vertical takeoff and landing drones was concluded in December 2022, with the aircraft able to launch from ships underway as well as from shore stations, and the Coast Guard at the time set out a plan to induct a hundred more. The MALE class is a different order of machine altogether. It is also the first Coast Guard aviation requirement in years that cannot be met from the existing Dornier line at Kanpur.

Where this sits against the 87 drone programme

A far larger case is already in motion. The Ministry is processing a Rs 32,000 crore programme for 87 MALE drones for the Air Force, Army and Navy, with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, Adani Defence, Solar Industries, Raphe mPhibr and Larsen and Toubro named among the competitors. Bids in that contest were submitted in the tri service 87 UAV programme in mid June.

The Coast Guard requirement is separate and much smaller. It draws on the same industrial base, which is the practical point for the firms involved.

None of the five is a settled MALE prime. The category in India is still being built, and the closest thing to a serving Indian MALE class asset is the Drishti-10, operated by the Navy and the Army, a licence built Hermes 900 rather than a clean sheet indigenous design. The Navy lost one off Porbandar this month, the second Drishti-10 lost in eighteen months. Whoever wins the Coast Guard order will be building capability as much as delivering it.

The water the aircraft would watch

The Coast Guard's area of responsibility is not evenly demanding. The Gujarat sector carries the maritime boundary with Pakistan and the traffic that comes with it. The eastern seaboard runs a different set of problems, and the island territories in the Andaman and Nicobar group and in Lakshadweep sit far enough offshore that manned patrol hours are expensive and finite.

The Coast Guard maintains surveillance across an EEZ of roughly two million square kilometres, using shore based aircraft and shipborne helicopters that can sanitise large areas quickly and are usually first to respond to an incident at sea. Its fixed wing fleet is built around the HAL manufactured Dornier 228, with Chetak and ALH Dhruv helicopters on the rotary side. Daily deployment, on the Ministry's own accounting, runs to between 10 and 12 aircraft alongside 18 to 20 ships.

Ten unmanned aircraft will not change that arithmetic on their own. They change what a single airframe can be asked to do in a day.

Timelines and the industry read

An RFI is the first formal step, not a contract. It gathers technical information, tests what industry can actually build, and feeds the staff requirement that a Request for Proposal is later written against. Nothing has been sanctioned.

The Coast Guard's own push to convert broad capability aims into quantifiable tender documents has been running through this year on the surface side, where a one day conference on future platforms set out the same sequence the aviation case is now following. Define the requirement in hard numbers first, then take it to the market and see what comes back.

Responses are due by October 7. The Ministry's first Coast Guard drone contract was signed in December 2022 for the multicopter fleet, and the gap between that and a MALE tender is the measure of how fast the service's unmanned ambitions have grown.